Andrew Fox - Over Our Heads

His big head thuds against the bulkhead. I drive us home with the window open to air the stink of vomit. I hope for a deer or a raccoon to appear in my high beams, something warm and alive that I could fail to avoid. But nothing comes.

In the morning, a voicemail from Ashley awaits me. She, as far as I know, still gets up at five a.m. to read, and right now she’ll be on her way to her work-study at the gallery. How fine it was, she says, to hear from me, and behind her voice I can hear the weatherman forecast a blizzard on the TV I wired into our kitchen.

I work the coffee-maker, go out to smoke but keep walking, and find myself some time later zipping my jacket over my uniform and jogging through an iron gateway at the university’s western end. At this hour, the campus is quiet: just some men from the phone company, an administrator type in a cherry-red Gore-Tex and a girl with an enormous backpack limping towards the library. Above me are the dorms, churchy grey stone piles with red-brick edging; and to the right is the concert auditorium, all swooping lines and hammered aluminium and vinyl posters of cellists. Before I flunked out I hardly ever went to class, but now I realize with a pang how long it’s been since I’ve learned anything. I’d like to know how something works, why something is the way it is.

‘Where the hell were you this morning?’ Luis says in the locker room. He is freshly showered but his eyes are cloudy, clean-shaven but there are nicks in his tubby jaw.

I splash water on my face at the sink and smooth the hair at the nape of my neck.

‘I went for a walk,’ I tell him. ‘Ashley left a message.’

‘Oh.’ Luis checks his watch; we collect the hand truck and head for the elevators. ‘Man, I don’t expect she was too happy. I couldn’t believe it last night when you said what you said to her.’

‘Well, there’s no taking back any of it now.’

The doors open on a wobbly old guy wearing an Air Force cap and oxygen tubes. Luis pushes the lobby button for him and leads us down the hallway to our first room. I put the strength of my shoulder hard into the armoire. All morning I shove and heave and blat the things on to the truck or into the carpet. At lunch we choke down plates of sodden calamari left over from a Chamber of Commerce meeting.

After lunch, I steady the hand truck, pin it down with a forearm when the armoire tries to tip it. Above me, more than my own weight in wood teeters and groans, and the only sign of Luis is the squeak of his hands on the veneer. I dive out of the way. The floorboards shake, the crash fills the room but the joints hold firm. Agnes, on one of her rounds, peers around the door frame and levels her grey eyes at us.

‘Sorry,’ Luis says, his cheeks flushed with hatred. ‘I slipped.’

‘Is that right?’

‘That’s right,’ I tell her.

‘Well, don’t slip again.’

‘No, Agnes,’ Luis says.

We take the armoire to the roof to break it apart. Luis kicks like a horse but I’m all frantic hands, tearing at joints and punching twisted laths and snapping pieces of particle board until my nail beds sting with splinters. The wind has picked up and the canopy fills. It flutters empty and fills again.

The air reaches around my waist where my shirt tail hangs and down the back of my neck where my jacket collar gapes; it numbs my lips and scrapes my throat and freezes my breath in fog. I pass the Chinese restaurant and the yoghurt place full of hollering upperclassmen, the cocktail bar where Randy goes to pretend he is somewhere else.

The main road out of town has no crosswalk; I take the stone steps to an underpass lit with the flicker of a trashcan fire. Around it circle two men swaddled in overcoats and one bare-legged and shivering in a dirty hospital gown. The tunnel roof dribbles the condensation of human breath.

I climb out again at the warehouse district where, at a raw space on the corner, an exhibition opening leaks its chatter on to the sidewalk. The warehouse I’m aiming for is in the middle of the block; it is built of brown brick, single-storeyed but with lofted ceilings and tall plate windows in which a chill moon dangles. I get out of the street light and smoke some cigarettes, careful to cup my hand over the embers. In dark corners and in the coldest places, the snow has begun to stick.

When the lights go off, I cross the street to meet her as she closes up. I watch the delicate way she balances a fat bag on a shoulder and a box of files against a knee.

‘You could’ve come in,’ she says without turning. She turns a key; the shutters rattle down.

‘I got your message,’ I say and offer a hand to help her down the steps but she doesn’t need it.

Her ponytail has been severed, leaving a straight-edged bob. Her thin cheeks blanch from the chill and her small nose reddens; I want to cup the heat of my hands around her ears.

‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her.

She shrugs. ‘I’m used to it.’

The party on the corner disgorges middle-aged couples. They wear camel-hair coats and broad-brimmed hats and clog the sidewalk to air-kiss. Ashley pops the trunk and I help her load her things. Her smell is old coffee and new perfume.

‘You look good,’ I say.

She crosses her arms and screws her lips into the goofy appraiser’s face she used to practise in front of the bathroom mirror.

‘You look …’ she says, ‘the same. In fact, I think you’re wearing the same exact outfit as the last time I saw you.’

‘It’s a uniform.’ I tug at the knees of my pants. ‘You’ve cut your hair.’

‘It was time for a change.’

‘It makes you look strong.’

She smiles. ‘That’s exactly what I wanted.’

‘And you’re happy?’ I say. ‘You’re doing good work?’

‘I am. I really am.’

I notice gobs of snow settled on my boot and kick them off.

‘That’s good, Ashley,’ I say. ‘That’s really good.’

For a short time in the eighties, when business was at its worst, the hotel opened its fourth floor to residential rentals. The people who took them mostly were short-term stays: professors with a one-semester contract or the better-off students between dorms for the summer months. There were some older people too who, once their children had left and their husbands or wives passed on, sold or rented their big Colonials to free up cash and to be in town.

Mrs Kimmel made the move in her late sixties and was surprised to live for another twenty-five years. She took out her disappointment at still being alive on whomever she could, insisted that the cleaning staff was stealing from her and called Luis ‘Taco’ until he told her that was Mexican, then did her research and called him ‘Ajiaco’ instead. One of my first jobs at the hotel was cleaning out her suite after she died. There were just a few items of over-laundered clothing and some old room-service plates — no books, no photos of anyone. But it wasn’t the modesty or even the loneliness of her life that made an impression on me; it was how, throughout those years as her mind gave up, her body had persisted, kept moving air and blood.

I think of Mrs Kimmel as I sneak in through the staff entrance and take the stairs to the banqueting floor; as I peek into the restaurant and find it dark, cross the room and lie down behind the polished warming stations. I used to think that if my body had even half her kind of resilience, I would be okay. But as I lay my head on a folded tablecloth and curl beneath another one, I’m not so sure.

All night, the floorboards creak, branches scratch the windowpanes and the elevator cables whir. From time to time, the night porter comes and sits at the table by the big bay window to pick over stolen French fries. I hold my breath, stay perfectly still, and when he is gone I take out my phone to watch a short video I recorded a little over a year ago before everything went to hell. In it, Ashley stands in our kitchen swamped in one of my sweatshirts. She is cooking to the Supremes, her small knees bouncing. She spoons something red and steaming from a pot and offers it to the camera.